Aztec Autumn - Jennings Gary (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗

I halted the train and Nocheztli summoned to us six warriors armed with maquahuime. To them I said:

"I will not waste powder and lead on such a trivial obstacle. If you six cannot sneak up to that post and dispatch those white men on the instant, you do not deserve to be carrying swords. Go and do exactly that. One caution, however: try not to tear or bloody the clothes they wear."

The men did the gesture of kissing the earth, and dashed off through the underbrush. In a very short time they came back, all of them beaming happily and two of them holding high, by the hair, the heads of the two Spanish soldiers, dripping blood from their bearded neck stumps.

"We did it ever so neatly, my lord," said one of them. "Only the ground got bloody."

So we proceeded on to the guard shack, where we scavenged, besides the four horses, two more arcabuces, polvora and balls for them, two steel knives and two steel swords. I set some men to stripping the soldiers' bodies of their armor and other garb, which was indeed unblemished except for the ingrained dirt and crusted sweat to be expected of uncleanly Spaniards. I congratulated the six warriors who had slain the soldiers, and the scouts who had found them, and told those scouts to go on ahead of us as before. Then I called for our two white men, Uno and Dos, to report to me.

"I have gifts for you," I told them. "Not only better clothes than those rags you are wearing, but also steel helmets and armor and stout boots."

"By the blood, Cap'n John, but we are grateful to you," said Uno. "Traveling shanks's-nag is hard enough on our old sea legs, let alone doing it baldfooted."

I took that goose language to be a complaint about their having to walk, and said, "You will not need to walk any farther, if you can ride horseback."

"If we could ride a shipwreck over the Tortoise reefs," said Dos, "I would reckon we can ride anything."

"Might I ask, Cap'n," said Uno. "How come we gets kitted out so fancy, and not some of your chief mates?"

"Because, when we get to Tonala, you two are going to be my mice."

"Mice, Cap'n?"

"I will explain when the time comes. Now, while the rest of us move on, you get into those uniforms, strap on the swords, get onto the two horses I am leaving for you and catch up to us as soon as you can."

"Aye aye, sir."

So Nocheztli and I had comfortable saddles again, and the two spare horses I put to use as pack animals, relieving several of my warriors of the heavy lead they were carrying.

The next event of any note occurred some days later, and this time I was not forewarned by my Azteca scouts. Nocheztli and I rode over a low ridge and found ourselves looking down on some mud huts clustered on the bank of a large pond. Four of our scouts were there, drinking water given them by the villagers and sociably smoking poquietin with them. I raised a hand to halt the column behind me and said to Nocheztli, "Collect all your knights and leading officers and join me yonder." He saw the look on my face and wordlessly went back to the train as I rode down to the little settlement.

I leaned from my horse and asked one of the scouts, "Who are these people?"

My look and my tone of voice made him stammer slightly. "Only—only simple fisher folk, Tenamaxtzin." And he beckoned to the oldest of the men present.

The old rustic sidled closer to me, fearful of my horse, and addressed me as respectfully as if I had been a mounted Spaniard. He spoke the tongue of the Kuanahuata, which is a language sufficiently similar to Nahuatl that I was able to understand him.

"My lord, as I was telling your warrior here, we live by fishing this pond. Only we few families, as our ancestors have done since time before time."

"Why you? Why here?"

"There lives in this pond a small and delectable whitefish that can be found in no other waters. Until lately, they have been our commodity of trade with other Kuanahuata settlements." He waved vaguely eastward. "But now there are white men—south, in Tonala. They also esteem these unique fish, and we can trade for rich goods such as we have never before—"

He broke off, looking past me as Nocheztli and his officers came to stand, maquahuime in hand, in a menacing ring about the cluster of huts. All the other folk huddled together, the men protectively putting their arms about the women and children. I spoke over my shoulder:

"Knight Nocheztli, give the order to kill the scouts."

"What? Tenamaxtzin, they are four of our best—" But he also broke off, when I turned my look on him, and obediently nodded to his nearest officers. Before the stunned and unbelieving scouts could move or make a sound of protest, they had been beheaded. The old man and his villagers stared in horror at the bodies lying twitching on the ground, and at the heads, apart, which were blinking their eyes as if still in disbelief of their fate.

I told the old man, "There will be no more white men for you to trade with. We are marching on Tonala to make sure of that. Any of you who wish to come with us—and help us slaughter those white men—may do so, and welcome. Any who do not will be put to death right here where you stand."

"My lord," pleaded the old man. "We have no quarrel with the white men. They have traded fairly with us. Since they came, we have prospered more than—"

"I have heard that argument too often before," I interrupted him. "I will say this just once again. There will be no white men, fair traders or otherwise. You saw what I have done to men of my own who took my words too lightly. Those of you who are coming, come now."

The old man turned to his people and spread his arms helplessly. Several of the men and boys, and two or three of the sturdier women, one of them leading her boy-child, stepped forward and made the kissing-the-earth gesture to me.

The old man sadly shook his head and said, "Even were I not too aged to fight and even to march, my lord, I would not leave this place of my fathers and my fathers' fathers. Do what you will."

What I did was take off his head with my own steel sword. At that, all the remaining men and boys of the village hastened to step forward and make the tlalqualiztli gesture. So did most of the women and young girls. Only three or four other females, holding babies in their arms or with infants clutching to their skirts, remained where they were.

"Tenamaxtzin," said the coyotl-faced officer Butterfly, with a solicitude I would not have expected of her, "those are innocent women and tiny children."

"You have killed others just like them," I said.

"But those were Spaniards!"

"These women can talk. These children can point. I want no witnesses left alive." I tossed her my spare sword, an obsidian-edged maquahuitl that hung by a thong from my pommel, because she was carrying only an arcabuz. "Here. Pretend they are Spaniards."

And so she did, but clumsily, because she was obviously reluctant to do it. Hence her victims suffered more than the several men had done, cowering under her blows and having to be hacked at more often than should have been necessary. By the time Butterfly was done, their copiously spilled blood had trickled down the bank and was staining the water red at the pond's margin. The villagers who had surrendered themselves to me—all of them wailing and tearing their hair and mantles—were herded back among our slave contingent, and I ordered that they be closely watched, lest they try to flee.